So, he was standing in the doorway. Launcher manager. The light from the hall framed his bald head and sparse hairs, which seemed to want to break away and fly into the black hole outside the window. I've been replacing him for how long? About 800 years? God, how do I remember.
We live in a social eon, so it is quite difficult to find a job. Nobody gets fired. But if you have found, for your good fortune, some dusty place occupied by artificial intelligence, you can safely claim it. All the work will still be done by AI, officially you. But if this place is occupied by an immortal… Anyway, I've just lost my job.
"Here's a letter for you," he said, and took a glowing piece of paper out of his raincoat pocket.
My insides turned cold.
“No...” I began, but the letter flew out of his hand and immediately ended up in mine.
“I'm sorry, I know what it's like, I guess…”
But I didn't hear his meaningless apologies. I was jerked somewhere through space and time. Before my eyes, or maybe not in front of them at all, the particles of my imprint flew into the toilet of eternity, and with them the planets, stars and clouds of interstellar gas. Someone took a drag on us like a good cigar, and then blew this smoke through my nostrils, and I found myself in a large stone hall with a ceiling that went somewhere into the dark void.
“Please go to the reception desk.”
The voice belonged to the head lowered behind the counter, I was sure of it, but still not completely.
“Excuse me, is this to you or something?”
“Yes,” the head rose and looked at me with displeasure.
I wiped my face with my hand, rather to check if it was still there, and then took two hesitant steps.
“Thank you for your diligence," nodded the head with only a brain, otherwise belonging to a woman of about forty, severely dressed.
"You have about three thousand years of parasitism on your account," she continued, almost looking at something in front of her eyes.
“But I'm, it's... worked on the launcher.”
“You were performing a duty, and this is not considered to be a service.”
Service is the period after five thousand years, when every immortal must find a job and spend a tenth of his life on it. This is part of a general galactic psychological practice to raise the general level of happiness among the immortals. But many, like me ditch it, and the Central Computator is forced to use “messengers”, guys with the same tickets as the launcher manager handed me. Having received it, you could not refuse. The message was sewn into the imprint, and the road to ships, portals, bars, and anywhere else basically was closed to you.
“And why only now?”
“You've been helpful.”
“Since I’ve been helpful, isn't it possible to...”
“It's impossible. There are not enough messengers. Here.”
And with that, she put a stack of glowing letters on the counter.
“There are…”
“Only twenty.”
“But I... and if they start running away from me.”
“Get a lot of impressions, see the galaxy.”
I froze, and the letters one by one began to fly into the endless pocket that opened by itself.
I was provided with accommodation only during the task, so I immediately had to go after the first parasite to the center of the Milky Way, where two supermassive black holes were rotating, devouring each other, on whose tidal forces adrenalin junkie immortals liked to surf.
How I hunted these vile bastards is a separate topic. The most interesting case happened to me when I had to deliver the last letter.
This task turned out to be the most difficult. The cunning man climbed into a planet torn apart by its very active star. Why it was impossible to teleport there without an Angel because of the strong radiation background. And the planet was also disintegrating and had impressive seismic activity, which made it impossible to choose even an entry point due to the constantly changing geometry and mass.
I had to order a ship and fly to it from the nadir point of this star system, which took me several months. And when I found myself near a collapsing planet, there was nothing left but to make the descent manually, because even spatial navigation was failing here.
In the cunning man's lair, I found a lot of shielding equipment that turned out to be completely useless.
“Ancient junk,” a voice came from somewhere in the depths of the cave, “I keep it for aesthetic pleasure.”
I reached into my pocket for the letter.
“Hey, buddy, wait,” the figure in the distance waved a hand, “let's go, I'd better show you something.”
Accustomed to the tricks of these sons of bitches, I was wary, but the boredom of the last months of the flight awakened my curiosity, which was almost drowned in immortality, and I moved towards the stranger. And why stranger? I have read his personal file from beginning to end fifty times. A trader of burnt imprints, a developer of banned software based on them, a hunter for ancient technologies. It was that rare type of immortals who only became more active over the years in their attempt to cheat the system.
“My name is Rat," he shouted, beckoning me to the cliff, inside of which something was glowing.
“I know.”
“Yes, you probably know everything about me. But I also learned a little about you. I've been working on something here.”
I walked up to him. Glowing eyes, a friendly smile. This is not how I imagined him. But I didn't have time to finish this thought, he grabbed my hand and threw me off the cliff. I fell into the light and lost consciousness.
I woke up on a desktop. The rat sat with his back to me and ruled something in the multidimensional program code.
"What have you done to me?" I almost screamed, jumping up.
"Freed," he said thoughtfully.
I frowned, trying to figure out what he meant, and then two plus two formed in my head. The code that I saw in front of his eyes and the endless emptiness that I felt inside me told a terrible story.
"You gave me a Demon," I whispered.
"That's right, that's right," the Rat nodded, "but don't panic. Now they won't be able to force you to do anything. Now you can go wherever you want, do whatever you want and, by the way…”
He shared the screen and before my eyes flashed images of the launcher on which I had spent so many years. But it wasn't the way I remembered it. The entire asteroid was packed with equipment, and in front of the Baby, our black hole, there was a giant portal. From there a huge military dreadnought of the defense forces of the Pure Empire of Outs fell into the Baby.
“Do you know anything about it?”
I shook my head negatively.
“And now you can find out. You can even get into their archives now,“ my ”liberator" smiled, turning to me.
“What will it do to me?” breathing heavily, I said, feeling my body.
“I told you, it's okay, you're free to do whatever you want now.”
"And what you, or whoever pays you for it, need," I growled and snatched the ticket out of my endless pocket. It flew out of my hand and landed right in the Rat's hand.
“And this is your thank…”
But he didn't have time to finish and disappeared from my sight.
For a while I just waited. I thought that I would also be picked up at his coordinates, but then I realized that the bastard was telling the truth, and I was really disconnected from the system.
I had to return to the ship myself. Fly back, request a glide curve over the link. All this antediluvian nonsense. But I’ve managed to get back to the Central Computator and even got a paper about the end of the service.
But I didn't forget the Rat's words, and to my surprise, the bastard didn't deceive me. I easily got access to the archives. The first thing I entered was data about you, but I didn't learn anything new. Then I checked the Baby. A black hole, inactive, class... and then I was stunned. A huge section was classified as secret. Operation Soaring Glory. The request of the Out Empire to send a four-dimensional fleet to the zone of the interdimensional anomaly.
There are no barriers for an Angel. He has known infinity. He can be anywhere and nowhere. But, it turns out, there is a point in the multiverse where he cannot visit. And this is our black hole. And not a black hole at all. This turns out to be the most famous anomaly in the multiverse. No Angel can get there, and no Demon, for that matter. More precisely, it can. But no one came back from there. Since the discovery of the THETA anomaly24z77a90i, 24701 combat and 101573 research groups have been sent. And none of them made themselves noticeable in any of the infinite universes that the Angels were checking.
So, you can be alive. It hit me like a butt on the head. I fell to the floor and sat for a long time in the majestic hall of the archive, staring blankly in front of myself.
When I got up, I called up the satellite image around the launcher. The endless ship of Outs continued to climb out of the portal and plunge into the Baby, distorting and dissolving into an anomaly. Damn lunatics. What are they doing? They send into the unknown those who can only throw neutron bombs at everything that moves. And now I have to get on this ship at all costs. At all costs.
ns3.135.198.159da2
→ Request update
and then Add to home screen.